I think the only thing I've ever overclocked 100% was my old Diamond Stealth II S220. Seeing as it didn't have a heatsink I glued an aluminum pencil sharpener to it and overclocked it from 40mhz to 80mhz.

Last edited by crazybus on Tue Mar 18, 2008 12:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

Some processors do good and some dont. I picked up a e2140 for my wife awhile back and it sucks in the overclocking department. 2.8 ghz is all it can do. That overclock was with my proven memory and motherboard so I know it was the processor. I had always planned on running it at stock speeds but wanted to see how high it would go. It was nothing to get excited over thats for sure.

As of right now I have my loyal Pentium D 930 (which if I would have known about the Core 2 Duo a couple of months earlier I wouldnt have bought the PD ) overclocked to 3.69 GHz stable from 3.0 GHz. This is so far my best OC since I cant overclock my little server which is running at 2.7 GHz and is idling at 46 C and under load it reaches about low 80s. My ultimate goal for my PD was to reach 3.8 GHz but after ~3.7 it just yells at me; The voice from within the PD yells, "Are you freaking kidding me? I ain't going to run at that speed!" But anyway, It runs about 36 C idle and reaches about high 40s to low 50s C after playing Crysis on my SWEET 7600 GT .

I picked up a e2140 for my wife awhile back and it sucks in the overclocking department. 2.8 ghz is all it can do.

I decided to buy an E2180 thinking 3000mhz would be decent given the cost and it would make a good stand by until the 45nm parts arrive but after 3000mhz for 2 months and never feeling near as fast as my E6600 at stock let alone 3000mhz or the 3600mhz I was running it at........ an idiot recommends I use Intel's TaT to test it which promptly overheats it badly each time I'm using it, I've got a good water cooling and at the time am confused but check and recheck the seat after changing the past and making sure on pump rpm... according to TaT 2100mhz was all my cpu should have gotten before burning a hole to china....... so I mention I believe the app is garbage and something is wrong but I didn't do any research and idiot claims he has and stands by his comment "it's an official Intel benchmark and diagnostic app".....after toasting my dual core for another day I delete the app but upon restarting the computer it suddenly won't post any higher than 2600mhz..... within 2 days it's dropped to 2200mhz and now I'm stuck at 2000mhz not entirely stable......I intend to unplug the pump given it was an Intel app that killed my cpu it's their dime and no I'm not concerned and no my conscience is clean on the matter, just waiting for the 2nd system to be built.

TAT is one of the most stressful apps that one can use for an Intel CPU. This means your OC does not really hold even you think it does. Also, it does not feel as fast probably because of the trimmed L2. Xbitlabs did a test and the drop off from E6K to E4K is ok, but the drop off from E4K to E2K is not. In your case going from E6K to E2K of course is going to be significant.

The Model M is not for the faint of heart. You either like them or hate them.

Well more and more applications are able to utilize the multiple cores. So you are going to be able to get more out of your CPU in instances where the whole CPU is utilized, BUT it also stresses the CPU more. That is one of the key reasons I like to make sure my CPU can run through brutal CPU stress testing, so I'm not riddled with blue screens.

How does your CPU fare with two instances of Prime 95 running?

Myself when I'm stress testing my cpu I run two instances (or 4 depending on the number of cores) on small fft's for at least 10 hours. if it passes with no errors and temperatures I can accept I run through memtest. If this passes I do a blend to get a little bit of everything and if it passes this I loop a stressful game for a good 8 hours to see if it's stable for that. Only after that do I declare a system stable to myself.

I hate blue screens and running my system in a set up that is going to cause problems for me later. I really do recommend this as I see no ill effect of running my system at the over 85% it is now. Plus I feel confident when programs come out that may stress my CPU or system more I will still have no problems.

TAT is one of the most stressful apps that one can use for an Intel CPU. This means your OC does not really hold even you think it does.

the problem here is relevance and having done some research on my own I've found out that TaT is virtually worthless having been developed for mobile cpu's it's temp indications are fundamentally flawed and the synthetic load test seems dubious at best.

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to me TaT is entirely worthless given the 2180 would have overheated at it's stock 2000mhz with the stock heatsink had I used the tool making it worthless...... punishing the cpu to gain information is something, TaT isn't IMHO.

Keep in mind that not all "CPU at 100%" is created equal. This has been explained even back in the days of CPUburn (a while back) where they would exercise the FPU more for the most intensive instructions that can generate the most heat. Just games and DVD decrypt is not that stressful enough for me. Prime95/Orthos, Folding, OCCT and TAT are the ones that really give the CPUs a workout.

It's really up to your tolerance level in the end I guess. There may be a slight chance with some random errors if you don't use those really "high end" stress programs to really stress the CPU. To call it "worthless" is a quite a stretch, TAT's temperature reporting may be wrong because of the changing Tjmax, but that's because it was rather old.

Your set of applications is dubious to me as to whether they really stress the CPU to the max. Games in particular stress the GPU more than the CPU.

The Model M is not for the faint of heart. You either like them or hate them.

so you ran some "benchmarks", played HL2, transferred files, ripped DVDs, burned DVDs, played BioShock.... do you realize that all of these don't stress the CPU to 100%?

sigh.....usually it's a little stressfull when your running a few of them simultanious while you wait for results from one app or another.

Stressful on I/O perhaps but not necessarily pushing the CPU to its limit. It's not indication of rock-solid stability in any event.

clone wrote:

Intel's TaT seems to be the only problem...... does that make TaT matter?..... to me no, that TaT wouldn't allow me to overclock more than 100mhz while every other app is good with it..... does that make TaT matter?..... to me no.

IMHO TaT's worthless.

note the IMHO, it's like basing my computers overclock on running Prime 95...... if it's 100% stable at everything except Prime 95 do I really care all that much?

I run it to test and then consider the results as a possible issue but I usually run my overclocks higher and if I run into an issue then I go with "well Prime 95 told me it would be an issue"... the problem with TaT for me is that a 100mhz being a possible issue really hurts it's value in my eyes when it's the only application showing any potential problem.

I guess you don't put much value in stability. I'd rather lose 5 or even 10% in performance than have a potentially flaky machine. In my experience I system that fails at Prime 95 will eventually crash or corrupt something else.BTW, if you were experiencing overheating and throttling with TAT, there's something seriously wrong with your watercooling setup or the DTS sensor on that processor. I don't use TAT as representative of temps under load (I use prime95 for that) because no real application will push the cpu that hard, but your cooling system should be able to handle it if you want your chip to last very long.